A Deficit of Delight

There’s something tremendously amusing to me about ignoring my YouTube channels for a year, and then just popping in today and making a video for each—completely out of the blue.

Can we still surprise people? Can we still delight them by doing something unexpected? Maybe that’s a part of the puzzle I’ve felt missing (as a creator and as a consumer) that I’ve only just put shape to.

Maybe that’s what I hate so much about the “new video every Tuesday at 4pm EST” approach to creating online. There’s no joy to it. It’s mechanical and empty. You get a new video every week, whether it’s good or not; whether the creator is excited about it or not; whether you have time to watch it or not.

I think it’s poisonous for the creative mind. We live inside a ticking time bomb when we should be living on whim; lost in passions and fascinations—the absent-minded professor changing the world but forgetting to change the clock for daylight savings.

Yes, we challenge ourselves to finish things, but not to satisfy an inane weekly schedule. We challenge ourselves to finish for the same reason a climber plants a flag on the summit of a mountain; to mark our accomplishment. We recognize the journey we’ve been on and then we depart for another.

I miss the days of YouTube that took place before the television mindset infected it. People weren’t making shows, they weren’t making episodes, they weren’t on a production schedule; they made a video and then set out to make something else—sometimes months between (or years.) YouTube wasn’t a broadcast channel, it was a place to save what you’ve created. It was a portfolio. Subscription existed to let you know when their new thing was out—like ordering something in the mail and not receiving an specified arrival date. It’s going to arrive. Who know when. Live inside that anticipation.

I want to create things that are anticipated. I want to delight. I want to surprise. Because then I can experience those same things myself in the process once again.